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The Rhetoric of Fiction
by Wayne C. BoothThe first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."
The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse, Materiality, and Power (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)
by Joshua J. Frye Michael S. BrunerThis book focuses on the rhetoric of food and the power dimensions that intersect this most fundamental but increasingly popular area of ideology and practice, including politics, culture, lifestyle, identity, advertising, environment, and economy. The essays visit a rich variety of dominant discourses and material practices through a range of media, channels, and settings including the White House, social movement rhetoric, televisual programming, urban gardens, farmers markets, domestic and international agriculture institutions, and popular culture. Rhetoricians address the cultural, political, and ecological motives and consequences of humans’ strategic symbolizing and attendant choice-making, visiting discourses and practices that have impact on our species in their producing, distributing, regulating, marketing, packaging, consuming, and talking about food. The essays in this book are representative of dominant and marginal discourses as well as perennial issues surrounding the rhetoric of food and include macro-, meso-, and micro-level analyses and case studies, from international neoliberal trade policies to media and social movement discourse to small group and interactional dynamics. This volume provides an excellent range and critical illumination of rhetoric’s role as both instrumental and constitutive force in food representations, and its symbolic and material effects.
Rhetoric of InSecurity: The Language of Danger, Fear and Safety in National and International Contexts (Law, Language and Communication)
by Victoria BainesThis book demands that we question what we are told about security, using tools we have had for thousands of years. The work considers the history of security rhetoric in a number of distinct but related contexts, including the United States’ security strategy, the "war" on Big Tech, and current concerns such as cybersecurity. Focusing on the language of security discourse, it draws common threads from the ancient world to the present day and the near future. The book grounds recent comparisons of Donald Trump to the Emperor Nero in a linguistic evidence base. It examines the potential impact on society of policy-makers’ emphasis on the novelty of cybercrime, their likening of the internet to the Wild West, and their claims that criminals have "gone dark". It questions governments’ descriptions of technology companies in words normally reserved for terrorists, and asks who might benefit. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book builds on existing literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences, most notably studies on rhetoric in Greco-Roman texts, and on the articulation of security concerns in law, international relations, and public policy contexts. It adds value to this body of research by offering new points of comparison, and a fresh but tried and tested way of looking at problems that are often presented as unprecedented. It will be essential to legal and policy practitioners, students of Law, Politics, Media, and Classics, and all those interested in employing critical thinking.
The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture (Routledge Studies In Rhetoric And Communication Ser. #3)
by Jessica ReymanIn recent years we have witnessed a rising tension between the open architecture of the Internet and legal restrictions for online activities. The impact of digital recording technologies and distributed file sharing systems has forever changed the expectations of everyday users with regard to digital information. At the same time, however, U.S. Copyright Law has shown a decided trend toward more restrictions over what we are able to do with digital materials. As a result, a gap has emerged between the reality of copyright law and the social reality of our everyday activities. Through an analysis of the competing rhetorical frameworks about copyright regulation in a digital age, this book shows how the stories told by active parties in the debate shape our cultural understanding of what is and is not acceptable in the use of copyrighted works on digital networks. Reyman posits recent legal developments as sites of conflict between competing value systems in our culture: one of control, relying heavily on comparisons of intellectual property to physical property, and emphasizing ownership, theft, and piracy, and the other a value of community, implementing new concepts such as that of an intellectual "commons," and emphasizing exchange, collaboration, and responsibility to a public good.
The Rhetoric of Judging Well: The Conflicted Legacy of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation)
by David A. Frank And Francis J. Mootz IIIKnown as the “swing justice,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy provided the key vote determining which way the Supreme Court would decide on some of the most controversial cases in US history. Though criticized for his unpredictable rulings, Kennedy also gained a reputation for his opinion writing and, more so, for his legal rhetoric.This book examines Justice Kennedy’s legacy through the lenses of rhetoric, linguistics, and constitutional law. Essays analyze Kennedy’s opinion writing in landmark cases such as Romer v. Evans, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Using the Justice’s rhetoric as an entry point into his legal philosophy, this volume reveals Kennedy as a justice with contradictions and blind spots—especially on race, women’s rights, and immigration—but also as a man of empathy deeply committed to American citizenship.A sophisticated assessment of Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence, this book provides new insight into Kennedy’s legacy on the Court and into the role that rhetoric plays in judging and in communicating judgment.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Ashutosh Bhagwat, Elizabeth C. Britt, Martin Camper, Michael Gagarin, James A. Gardner, Eugene Garver, Leslie Gielow Jacobs, Sean Patrick O’Rourke, Susan E. Provenzano, Clarke Rountree, Leticia M. Saucedo, Darien Shanske, Kathryn Stanchi, and Rebecca E. Zietlow.
The Rhetoric of Literary Communication: From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics)
by Virginie Iché Sandrine SorlinBuilding on the notion of fiction as communicative act, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to examine the evolving relationship between authors and readers in fictional works from 18th-century English novels through to contemporary digital fiction. The book showcases a diverse range of contributions from scholars in stylistics, rhetoric, pragmatics, and literary studies to offer new ways of looking at the "author–reader channel," drawing on work from Roger Sell, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and James Phelan. The volume traces the evolution of its form across historical periods, genres, and media, from its origins in the conversational mode of direct address in 18th-century English novels to the use of second-person narratives in the 20th century through to 21st-century digital fiction with its implicit requirement for reader participation. The book engages in questions of how the author–reader channel is shaped by different forms, and how this continues to evolve in emerging contemporary genres and of shifting ethics of author and reader involvement. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of pragmatics, stylistics, and literary studies.
The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators
by Joseph RoismanThis study of manhood in fourth-century Athens provides a comprehensive examination of notions about masculinity found in the Attic orators who represent one of the most important sources for understanding the social history of this period. Roisman focuses on topics such as the nexus between manhood and age; on Athenian men in their various roles; on the concept of masculine shame; on manhood in the military and politics; on the manly virtue of self-control; and on what men feared.
The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People (Studies in Rhetoric & Communication)
by Xing LuThis thorough examination of Mao&’s speeches and writings and how they reshaped a nation &“is critical to an understanding of modern China&” (Choice). Mao Zedong fundamentally transformed China from a Confucian society characterized by hierarchy and harmony into a socialist state guided by communist ideologies of class struggle and radicalization. It was a transformation made possible largely by Mao&’s rhetorical ability to attract, persuade, and mobilize millions of Chinese people. In this book, Xing Lu analyzes Mao&’s speeches and writings over a span of sixty years, tracing the sources and evolution of his discourse, analyzing his skills as an orator and mythmaker, assessing his symbolic power and continuing presence in contemporary China, and observing that Mao&’s rhetorical legacy has been commoditized, culturally consumed, and politically appropriated since his death. Applying both Western rhetorical theories and Chinese rhetorical concepts to reach a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of his rhetorical legacy, Lu shows how Mao employed a host of rhetorical appeals and strategies drawn from Chinese tradition and how he interpreted the discourse of Marxism-Leninism to serve foundational themes of his message. She traces the historical contexts in which these themes, his philosophical orientations, and his political views were formed and how they transformed China and Chinese people. Lu also examines how certain ideas are promoted, modified, and appropriated in Mao&’s rhetoric. His appropriation of Marxist theory of class struggle, his campaigns of transforming common people into new communist advocates, his promotion of Chinese nationalism, and his stand on China&’s foreign policy all contributed to and were responsible for reshaping Chinese thought patterns, culture, and communication behaviors.
The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century: Government, Corporate, and Activist Discourses (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)
by Heather Graves David Edward BeardThis book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing. In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century. This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.
The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion
by James L. KastelyPlato isn't exactly thought of as a champion of democracy, and perhaps even less as an important rhetorical theorist. In this book, James L. Kastely recasts Plato in just these lights, offering a vivid new reading of one of Plato's most important works: the Republic. At heart, Kastely demonstrates, the Republic is a democratic epic poem and pioneering work in rhetorical theory. Examining issues of justice, communication, persuasion, and audience, he uncovers a seedbed of theoretical ideas that resonate all the way up to our contemporary democratic practices. As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises: one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can see--in a world where the powerful dominate the weak--how justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric; it must become a persuasive part of the larger culture--which, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles.
The Rhetoric of Pregnancy
by Marika SeigelIt is a truth widely acknowledged that if you’re pregnant and can afford one, you’re going to pick up a pregnancy manual. From What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Pregnancy for Dummies, these guides act as portable mentors for women who want advice on how to navigate each stage of pregnancy. Yet few women consider the effect of these manuals—how they propel their readers into a particular system of care or whether the manual they choose reflects or contradicts current medical thinking. Using a sophisticated rhetorical analysis, Marika Seigel works to deconstruct pregnancy manuals while also identifying ways to improve communication about pregnancy and healthcare. She traces the manuals’ evolution from early twentieth-century tomes that instructed readers to unquestioningly turn their pregnancy management over to doctors, to those of the women’s health movement that encouraged readers to engage more critically with their care, to modern online sources that sometimes serve commercial interests as much as the mother’s. The first book-length study of its kind, The Rhetoric of Pregnancy is a must-read for both users and designers of our prenatal systems—doctors and doulas, scholars and activists, and anyone interested in encouraging active, effective engagement.
A Rhetoric of Reflection
by Kathleen Blake YanceyReflection in writing studies is now entering a third generation. Dating from the 1970s, the first generation of reflection focused on identifying and describing internal cognitive processes assumed to be part of composing. The second generation, operating in both classroom and assessment scenes in the 1990s, developed mechanisms for externalizing reflection, making it visible and thus explicitly available to help writers. Now, a third generation of work in reflection is emerging. As mapped by the contributors to A Rhetoric of Reflection, this iteration of research and practice is taking up new questions in new sites of activity and with new theories. It comprises attention to transfer of writing knowledge and practice, teaching and assessment, portfolios, linguistic and cultural difference, and various media, including print and digital. It conceptualizes conversation as a primary reflective medium, both inside and outside the classroom and for individuals and collectives, and articulates the role that different genres play in hosting reflection. Perhaps most important in the work of this third generation is the identification and increasing appreciation of the epistemic value of reflection, of its ability to help make new meanings, and of its rhetorical power—for both scholars and students. Contributors: Anne Beaufort, Kara Taczak, Liane Robertson, Michael Neal, Heather Ostman, Cathy Leaker, Bruce Horner, Asao B. Inoue, Tyler Richmond, J. Elizabeth Clark, Naomi Silver, Christina Russell McDonald, Pamela Flash, Kevin Roozen, Jeff Sommers, Doug Hesse
The Rhetoric of Resistance to Prison Education: How the "War on Crime" Became the "War on Criminals" (NCA Focus on Communication Studies)
by Adam KeyThis book explores the discourse and rhetoric that resists and opposes postsecondary prison education. Positioning prison college programs as the best method to truly reduce recidivism, the book shows how the public – and by extension politicians – remain largely opposed to public funding for these programs, and how prisoners face internal resistance from their fellow inmates when pursuing higher education. Utilizing methods including critical rhetorical history, media analysis, and autoethnography, the author explores and critiques the discourses which inhibit prison education. Cultural discourses, echoed through media portrayal of prisoners, produce criminals as both subhuman and always-already a threat to the public. This book highlights the history of rhetorical opposition to prison education; closely analyzes how convictism, prejudicial and discriminatory bias against prisoners, blocks education access and feeds the prison-industrial-complex an ever-recycled supply of free prison labor; and discusses the implications of prison education for understanding and contesting cultural discourses of criminality. This book will be an important reference for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in the fields of Rhetoric, Criminal justice, and Sociology, as well as Media and Communication studies more generally, Politics, and Education studies.
The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society Series)
by Beverly A. SauerThe crash of an Amtrak train near Baltimore, the collapse of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, the incident at Three Mile Island, and other large-scale technological disasters have provided powerful examples of the ways that communication practices influence the events and decisions that precipitate a disaster. These examples have raised ethical questions about the responsibility of writers within agencies, epistemological questions about the nature of representation in science, and rhetorical questions about the nature of expertise and experience as grounds for judgments about risk. In The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments, author Beverly Sauer examines how the dynamic uncertainty of the material environment affects communication in large regulatory industries. Sauer's analysis focuses specifically on mine safety, which provides a rich technical and historical context where problems of rhetorical agency, narrative, and the negotiation of meaning have visible and tragic outcomes. But the questions Sauer asks have larger implication for risk and safety: How does writing function in large regulatory industries? What can we learn from experience? Why is this experience so difficult to capture in writing? What information is lost when agencies rely on written documentation alone? Given the uncertainties, how can we work to improve communication in hazardous and uncertain environments? By exploring how individuals make sense of the material, technical, and institutional indeterminancies of their work in speech and gesture, The Rhetoric of Risk helps communicators rethink their frequently unquestioned assumptions about workplace discourse and the role of writers in hazardous worksites. It is intended for scholars and students in technical writing and communication, rhetoric, risk analysis and risk communication, as well as a wide range of engineering and technical fields concerned with risk, safety, and uncertainty.
The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Routledge Revivals)
by null William Powell JonesHenry Fielding (1933) examines Fielding’s prodigious activity as dramatist, journalist, novelist and magistrate. Though Fielding lived mainly by his pen, the profession he had chosen for himself, and the one in which he ardently desired to succeed, was that of the law, and this book takes the man as a whole in looking at his writings and his success at law.
The Rhetoric of Social Intervention: An Introduction
by Susan K. Opt Dr Mark A. GringAuthors Susan Opt and Mark Gring present the first-ever thorough exploration and discussion of the rhetoric of social intervention model [RSI] (initially conceived by rhetorical theorist William R. Brown) for today's students, scholars, and professionals. This unique communication-based model, compatible with traditional and non-traditional critical approaches, provides readers with a systemic framework for interpreting, analyzing, critiquing, and intervening in social and cultural change from a rhetorical perspective. It offers an easily accessible tool for critically reflecting upon the ongoing process of rhetorical intervention in people's interpretations of needs, relationships, and worldview. Readers will learn to use the RSI model to (1) reflect on their own symbolic natures, (2) identify rhetorical trends that generate social change, (3) critique social interventions, (4) initiate social interventions, and (5) anticipate the side effects of interventional choices. The Rhetoric of Social Intervention: An Introduction includes these key features: A detailed, step-by-step approach to help readers develop their skills in analyzing the communication patterns of social interventions and writing their analysis as a critical essayExamples and exercises to promote an interactive, transformative learning environment and encourage the development of critical thinking skills Service learning activities in every chapter that can be completed as individual, group, or class projects Review questions, exercises, and an "Under the Lens" feature in every chapter to help readers deepen their understanding Student and scholar essays that demonstrate the model's critical application Intended Audience: Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetorical Criticism, Rhetorical Theory, Persuasion, Public Address, Social Movements, and Advocacy Communication, the book's focus on criticism as a tool for interpreting social change makes it an excellent supplement for courses in other communication sub-specialties, such as public relations and advertising, and in related disciplines such as marketing, sociology, political science, management, and not-for-profit management. The book also offers communication practitioners a useful guide for the strategic planning of interventions.
The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media
by Nathan CrickThis collection provides an accessible yet rigorous survey of the rhetorical study of historical and contemporary social movements and promotes the study of relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social assemblage. Offering a comprehensive collection of the latest research in the field, The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media suggests a framework for the study of social movements grounded in a methodology of "slow inquiry" and the interconnectedness of these imminent phenomena. Chapters address the rhetorical tactics that social movements use to gain attention and challenge power; the centrality of traditional and new media in social movements; the operations of power in movement organization, leadership, and local and global networking; and emerging contents and environments for social movements in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is framed by case studies (drawn from movements across the world, ranging from Black Lives Matter and Occupy to Greek anarchism and indigenous land protests) that ground conceptual characteristics of social movements in their continuously unfolding reality, furnishing readers with both practical and theoretical insights. The Rhetoric of Social Movements will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of rhetoric, communication, media studies, cultural studies, social protest and activism, and political science.
The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror
by Marc RedfieldThe terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the American idiom “9/11”: a bare name-date conveying both a trauma (the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of “virtual trauma” to describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11 in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and United 93.In the second half of the book, Redfield examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of “war on terror.” Redfield argues that the declaration of war on terror is the exemplary postmodern sovereign speech act: it unleashes war as terror and terror as war, while remaining a crazed, even in a certain sense fictional performative utterance. Only a pseudosovereign—the executive officer of the world’s superpower—could have declared this absolute, phantasmatic, yet terribly damaging war. Though politicized terror and absolute war have their roots in the French Revolution and the emergence of the modern nation-state, Redfield suggests that the idea of a war on terror relays the complex, spectral afterlife of sovereignty in an era of biopower, global capital, and telecommunication.A moving, wide-ranging, and rigorous meditation on the cultural tragedy of our era, The Rhetoric of Terror also unfolds as an act of mourning for Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s groundbreaking philosophical analysis of iterability—iterability as the exposure to repetition with a difference elsewhere that makes all technics, signification, and psychic life possible—helps us understand why questions of mediation and aesthetics so rapidly become so fraught in our culture; why efforts to repress our essential political, psychic, and ontological vulnerability generate recursive spasms of violence; why ethical living-together involves uninsurable acts of hospitality. The Rhetoric of Terror closes with an affirmation of eirenic cosmopolitanism.
The Rhetoric of the Gospel
by C. Clifton BlackRhetorical approaches that examine how the biblical text expresses itself in ways that are beautiful and persuasive have become increasingly popular for the serious study of the Bible. This book introduces students of the New Testament to classical rhetorical analysis by exploring the gospels and the book of Acts and the development of early Christian preaching.
The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake
by Irene PeiranoPrevious scholarship on classical pseudepigrapha has generally aimed at proving issues of attribution and dating of individual works, with little or no attention paid to the texts as literary artefacts. Instead, this book looks at Latin fakes as sophisticated products of a literary culture in which collaborative practices of supplementation, recasting and role-play were the absolute cornerstones of rhetorical education and literary practice. Texts such as the Catalepton, the Consolatio ad Liviam and the Panegyricus Messallae thus illuminate the strategies whereby Imperial audiences received and interrogated canonical texts and are here explored as key moments in the Imperial reception of Augustan authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus. The study of the rhetoric of these creative supplements irreverently mingling truth and fiction reveals much not only about the neighbouring concepts of fiction, authenticity and reality, but also about the tacit assumptions by which the latter are employed in literary criticism.
The Rhetoric of Valéry's Prose Aubades
by Ursula R. FranklinWhile Paul Valéry's lyric poetry, as well as his dialogues, dramatic work, and critical prose, have preoccupied his critics, his prose poems have been virtually ignored and his position in the tradition of the genre has remained unacknowledged. This study demonstrates the significance of Valéry as a prose poet and of the form and its evolution in the poet's oeuvre. The close textual reading and analysis concentrate on Valéry's prose aubades – the prose poems, poetic prose fragments, and sequences celebrating the emergence of the self and its world at dawn. The theme of dawn pervades Valéry's poetry from the opening chord of Charmes to those Notebooks which he kept from almost half a century and which are the source of so much of his poetry. This book shows how the moment and theme of dawn have also inspired the greater part of Valéry's prose poems and poetic prose fragments. Critics have begun to show interest in the break-up of traditional genres and in the emergence of the fragment as a new literary form. But Valéry's position in this development has so far escaped critical inquiry, as have his prose poems in general. Professor Franklin redresses the balance with rigor, poise, and elegance. She shows how Valéry's artistic progression from the traditional prose poem to the fragment, the evolution of the recueil to the sequence, represents a development very similar to that manifests in another new prose form, the new nouveau roman. It is a brilliant analysis of a neglected aspect of Valéry's work and a thoughtful interpretation of Valéry's thought and poetics as a whole.
The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice: Procedural Habits (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)
by Steve HolmesThe Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice offers a critical reassessment of embodiment and materiality in rhetorical considerations of videogames. Holmes argues that rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of "habit" offer a critical resource for describing the interplay between thinking (writing and rhetoric) and embodiment. The book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of character (ethos), habit (hexis), and nature (phusis) can productively connect rhetoric to what Holmes calls "procedural habits": the ways in which rhetoric emerges from its interactions with the dynamic accumulation of conscious and nonconscious embodied experiences that consequently give rise to meaning, procedural subjectivity, control, and communicative agency both in digital game design discourse and the activity of play.
The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy
by Chiara FerrariThe Italian fascists under Benito Mussolini appropriated many aspects of the country's Catholic religious heritage to exploit the mystique and power of the sacred. One concept that the regime deployed as a core strategy was that of "sacrifice." In this book, Chiara Ferrari interrogates how the rhetoric of sacrifice was used by the Italian fascist regime throughout the interwar years to support its totalitarian project and its vision of an all-encompassing bond between the people and the state.The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy focuses on speeches by Benito Mussolini and key literary works by prominent writers Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini. Through this investigation, Ferrari demonstrates how sacrifice functioned in relation to other elements of fascist rhetoric, such as the frequent reiterations of an impending national crisis, the need for collaboration among social classes, and the forging of social contact between the leader and the people.
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography: The Formation of a Discipline at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
by Stefan H. UhligIn Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding.Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.
Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England
by Markku PeltonenRhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England provides a completely new account of the political thought and culture of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. It examines the centrality of humanist rhetoric in the pre-revolutionary educational system and its vital contribution to the political culture of the period. Humanism, Markku Peltonen argues, was crucial to the development of the participatory character of English politics as schoolboys were taught how to speak about taxation and foreign policy, liberty and tyranny. A series of case studies illustrates how pre-revolutionary Englishmen used the rhetorical tools their schoolmasters had taught them in political and parliamentary debates. The common people and the multitude were the orator's chief audience and eloquence was often seen as a popular art. But there were also those who followed these developments with growing dismay and Peltonen examines further the ways in which populist elements in political rhetoric were questioned in pre-revolutionary England.